An Open Letter To Associative Press To Change Animal Pronouns

When Max was a puppy (and into his adulthood); I used to get angry and fight with folks who address him as "it".  Americans were no exception but most of them were Indians. It's was a default mindset - a habit of mind but it does shape consciously and subconsciously how they perceive non-human animals. 

Watch the movie Arrival to understand how language affects our thinking. 

Ian Donnelly: You know, I was doing some reading, um, about this idea that if you immerse yourself into a foreign language, then you can actually rewire your brain.

Dr. Louise Banks: The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Ian Donnelly: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Louise Banks: It’s the the theory that, uh, it, it’s the theory that, uh, the language you speak determines how you think and…

Ian Donnelly: Yeah, it affects how you see everything. It’s, uh, I’m curious, are you dreaming in their language?

Dr. Louise Banks: I may have had a few dreams, but I don’t, I don’t think that that makes me unfit to do this job.

Addressing the same issue, now In Defense Of Animals organization (members include Dr. Jane Goodall) has an open letter to AP: 

In the 1960s, world-renowned ethologist and conservationist, Dr. Jane Goodall submitted her first scientific paper on chimpanzees that was promptly returned to her to be edited. Every place she had written he or she to describe a chimpanzee had been replaced with it, and every who had been replaced with which.

Goodall refused to budge and won a small battle for nonhuman animals back then, but decades later we’re still waiting for respected style guides like The Associated Press Stylebook to catch up on the relative pronouns used to describe them.

In an age struggling with industrialized animal cruelty, the sixth mass extinction of species, a climate crisis, and the exploitation of the natural world, the way we use language influences the way we see our relationship with our environment and the nonhuman animals we share it with.

This isn’t a niche topic or a trend in language, and it affects a broad range of stakeholders. Our lives intersect with nonhuman animals in myriad ways. They live in our homes as our companions and visit our yards as wild guests. They’re hunted, farmed, and eaten. They’re raised and killed for their skins and fur. They’re used in research and entertainment and held captive in zoos and aquariums.

Wild and domesticated nonhuman animals are everywhere around us, and the scientific consensus is that they too are conscious beings.

Conscious beings cannot be described similarly to cars, or couches, as it and that and which. It is inaccurate and unjust to describe nonhuman animals as if they were inanimate objects, yet it’s done every single day — and writers are instructed to do so at the behest of widely-used and respected style guides, such as The Associated Press Stylebook.

Mass media, which defaults to this guide in particular, has a great influence on our perception and therefore has an enormous responsibility to portray nonhuman animals as precisely as possible. This is especially true considering the overlap of nonhuman animals and social justice issues that are being increasingly covered by journalists.

Yet the current references to them as it, that and which reduces individual nonhuman animals deserving of our understanding, respect, and protection to mere objects to be owned and exploited for utilitarian purposes.

The Associated Press Stylebook instructs writers not to apply a personal pronoun to an animal unless their sex has been established, or they have a name. This is too limiting to writers as well as fellow nonhuman animals, most of whom are discussed abstractly and thus their sex is not established. We pay respect to humans whose sex is indeterminate or gender fluid by using he/she or the non-binary term they. That same courtesy should be extended to all animals, as they are gendered beings.

When gender is known, the standard guidance should be, she/her/hers and he/him/his, regardless of species. When it is unknown, the gender-neutral they, he/she, or his/hers should be used. It is also preferable to use who rather than that or which when describing any individual nonhuman animal. See full recommendation at Animals and Media.

“When I began my research and shared it at Cambridge, I was told that my findings and approaches, including giving the chimpanzees names, were wrong. I was also told that surely the realizations that chimpanzees have individuality and emotions were wrong - at the time it was believed that other animals were essentially automatons devoid of complexity and very different from humans. How wrong they all were. 

Thankfully, we have come very far in our understanding of the other animals with whom we share this planet. We know that they feel joy, pain, grieve, and demonstrate compassion and altruism. We are not separate in kind from other species, but rather by mere degree. I've spent my life working to grow respect for nonhuman animals, and to ensure a future for the complex tapestry of life on Earth, but as we face devastating losses and cruelty to individuals and species, we must do everything we can to help people recognize the sentience and innate value of other animals. 

I've often said that to make the change you must reach the heart, and to reach the heart you must tell stories. The way we write about other animals shapes the way we see them - we must recognize that every individual nonhuman animal is a 'who,' not a 'what.' I hope that we can advance our standards in this regard globally to refer to animals as individuals, and no longer refer to them as objects, so that the stories we tell spark compassion and action for these fellow beings," said Dr. Goodall.

For language to achieve accurate communication of the world around us that allows us to educate ourselves, make informed decisions, and navigate a way forward, it must continuously evolve. This change would be a simple, yet monumental, step towards promoting accuracy in communication and ending the objectification of nonhuman animals we live amongst.

The undersigned individuals and organizations have long held that this update should be made, and agree that it should be made as soon as possible. We would appreciate hearing what efforts The Associated Press is planning to make in this regard. Thank you.

Octopus Dreaming

- More here

Growing A More Resilient Global Food System

We as a society don't respect food. We have no sense of history.  We unleash gratitude on abstract and subjective bullshit and refuse to see what is in front of our noses. The abundance of food that we take for granted and waste is precarious. Life, as we know on this planet, can change at a moment's notice. 

For those who are willing to learn - here: 

The next crisis could well be worse. After all, global harvests have been mostly unaffected by Covid-19, and food prices didn’t rise dramatically in 2020 (though they have been edging up in early 2021). When lockdowns shuttered restaurants, school cafeterias and workplace eateries — the food service industry that formerly accounted for about half the food consumed — suppliers pivoted within a few weeks, finding ways to repackage their products into smaller portions for retail sale.

But we may not be so lucky next time. “It’s not unlikely that sometime over the next decade or two we will have a significantly worse drought,” says Tim Benton, a food systems researcher at Chatham House, a UK-based think tank. Such a drought or some other equally severe weather event, or a major crop disease outbreak, could decrease global food production by 10 or 15 percent, he says, leading to skyrocketing food prices, hunger and widespread panic. “That is orders of magnitude worse than Covid.”

[---]

Our modern food system emphasizes efficiency over resilience — and that comes at a cost. Vast monocultures of Russian wheat, American corn and Brazilian soybeans feed a worldwide market, but the lack of genetic diversity leaves crops vulnerable to disease. Meat-packing plants have grown larger, allowing economies of scale — but when Covid-19 hit two beef-packing plants in Alberta last spring, the resulting closures reduced Canadian beef-processing capacity by an estimated 40 percent.

And at every link in the food supply chain, growers and processors have become used to dealing with single buyers or sellers, thus avoiding the extra expense of catering to multiple needs. Many vegetable growers, for example, sell only to the food service industry, allowing them to focus their packing lines on the large quantities that commercial buyers seek.

“We have stripped out redundancy in the name of efficiency to drive down prices,” says Benton. “We have stripped out diversity. We expect to be able to buy goods whatever the season. And, as Covid has illustrated, we have lost the flexibility in our supply chains. If you lose your buyer, you end up throwing things away.”

This is already changing, as food producers, processors and shippers struggle to cope with Covid-19. In Thailand and Malaysia, for example, small-scale farmers and fishers have taken advantage of ubiquitous mobile phones to sell their products directly to local consumers online, finding new markets as their usual wholesalers have stopped buying. And already, at least one large food-processing firm that once bought its raw material from a single supplier told Swinnen it is now sourcing more widely. “It’s diversifying your supply system — and diversification is always good in terms of risk management,” he says.

[---]

Resilience will be even more important as the effects of climate change bring not just hotter growing seasons but also more extreme droughts and storms. To cope, farmers will need to consider measures such as changing their crop mix to favor less water-intensive crops, Richards says.

Any efforts to make food systems more resilient must also deal with the massive role of international trade in food products. American consumers eat Peruvian asparagus and Australian lamb while Chinese eat American pork and Brazilian soybeans, in a global carousel of food trade that tops $1 trillion annually. In essence, many countries are outsourcing the production of their foods to places better able to grow them cheaply.

This has helped keep food prices low, but at some risk. “You’re essentially betting on the stability of the world to provide your food,” says Benton. If we can’t count on that stability — in a future threatened by climate change and the political turmoil it might cause, say — that bet starts to look like a bad idea.

 

Sperm Whales In 19th Century Shared Ship Attack Information

I have never read Moby-Dick and never will. Killing a beautiful sentient cetacean in their own home is brutal and savagery.  A new study illustrates how these cetaceans shared the sapien attack information and avoid places where sapiens were likely to be found. Read the entire piece here: 

A remarkable new study on how whales behaved when attacked by humans in the 19th century has implications for the way they react to changes wreaked by humans in the 21st century.

The paper, published by the Royal Society on Wednesday, is authored by Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell, pre-eminent scientists working with cetaceans, and Tim D Smith, a data scientist, and their research addresses an age-old question: if whales are so smart, why did they hang around to be killed? The answer? They didn’t.

Using newly digitised logbooks detailing the hunting of sperm whales in the north Pacific, the authors discovered that within just a few years, the strike rate of the whalers’ harpoons fell by 58%. This simple fact leads to an astonishing conclusion: that information about what was happening to them was being collectively shared among the whales, who made vital changes to their behaviour. As their culture made fatal first contact with ours, they learned quickly from their mistakes.

[---]

Sperm whales are highly socialised animals, able to communicate over great distances. They associate in clans defined by the dialect pattern of their sonar clicks. Their culture is matrilinear, and information about the new dangers may have been passed on in the same way whale matriarchs share knowledge about feeding grounds. Sperm whales also possess the largest brain on the planet. It is not hard to imagine that they understood what was happening to them.

The hunters themselves realised the whales’ efforts to escape. They saw that the animals appeared to communicate the threat within their attacked groups. Abandoning their usual defensive formations, the whales swam upwind to escape the hunters’ ships, themselves wind-powered. ‘This was cultural evolution, much too fast for genetic evolution,’ says Whitehead.

And in turn, it evokes another irony. Now, just as whales are beginning to recover from the industrial destruction by 20th-century whaling fleets – whose steamships and grenade harpoons no whale could evade – they face new threats created by our technology. ‘They’re having to learn not to get hit by ships, cope with the depredations of longline fishing, the changing source of their food due to climate change,’ says Whitehead. Perhaps the greatest modern peril is noise pollution, one they can do nothing to evade.

Whitehead and Randall have written persuasively of whale culture, expressed in localised feeding techniques as whales adapt to shifting sources, or in subtle changes in humpback song whose meaning remains mysterious. The same sort of urgent social learning the animals experienced in the whale wars of two centuries ago is reflected in the way they negotiate today’s uncertain world and what we’ve done to it.

As Whitehead observes, whale culture is many millions of years older than ours. Perhaps we need to learn from them as they learned from us. After all, it was the whales that provoked Melville to his prophesies in Moby-Dick. “We account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in individuality,” he wrote, “and if ever the world is to be again flooded … then the eternal whale will still survive, and … spout his frothed defiance to the skies.”

Happy Birthday Max!

My little world became a paradise because Max was born this day 15 years ago. He would have loved this beautiful morning playing with his new toys and waiting for his birthday cake. 

It is no accident that the first day of spring will always be on 21st March. 

I love Max... I miss you. Happy birthday, my dear, I will see you soon. 

                                                    

     March'21 2013, Max's 6th Birthday

43 Minutes With Happy the Elephant...

The advance of knowledge deludes us into thinking we are different from other animals, but our history shows that we are not.

- John N. Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

Molly Young writes about her meeting with Happy, The Elephant at Bronx Zoo. It's heartbreaking... but thanks to the unrelenting efforts of the Non-Human Rights Project there is hope for future animals. 

One recent morning, I zipped toward the Bronx in a Lyft outfitted with a murder room’s worth of plastic. My task: to seek the meaning of solitude from an elderly female who has lived alone, more or less, for 15 years.

Her name is Happy, and she is an Asian elephant. Happy was captured, along with six others, in the early 1970s, “probably in Thailand,” according to The Atlantic. The calves, named after Disney’s seven dwarves, were sent to the U.S. and dispersed among zoos and circuses. Happy and a companion, Grumpy, ended up at the Bronx Zoo. The facility has had a number of elephants over the years, but they have mostly died off, and today there are just two: Happy and a second Elephas maximus named Patty. Owing to interpersonal conflicts of the past, Happy and Patty are kept in separate enclosures. “I always say they’re like sisters who don’t want to share the same room,” Jim Breheny, the zoo’s director, told me.

[---]

The tacit argument of a zoo is that anthropomorphism is a constructive fiction — a way for humans to connect with other animals and develop a stake in their fates. Which is asking a lot of a typical zoo patron. Earlier, I’d lingered by a concession stand called the Pecking Order, which sells chicken tenders across the path from a duck-and-crane pond. The smell of fried poultry mingled with the smell of live birds.

We watched as Happy complied with Michelle’s requests. Seeing the great animal in her pen felt ominous and sacred, like listening to the last speaker of a dying language. Will a kid born in New York City in 2021 grow up to see elephants at the Bronx Zoo? Probably not. The facility has announced that it has no plans to import more elephants after Happy and Patty ascend to the sphere of celestial rewards.

And zoos, in general, are falling out of fashion. Part of that can be attributed to groups like the Non-human Rights Project. More broadly, the public is increasingly aware of animal-cognition studies, which have advanced to a point where one can plausibly argue that an octopus, for example, has a soul. We know that elephants use tools and mourn their dead. They cooperate. They are social animals.

How can we ­mea­sure an ­elephant’s suffering when we can’t ­measure our own?

The historian Fay Bound Alberti has studied loneliness, and she makes a distinction between negative solitude and what was once understood as “oneliness.” Negative solitude, or loneliness, is painful. Oneliness is just a physical state — the condition of being by yourself. Here we face the question of whether Happy is experiencing loneliness or merely oneliness. The position of the Bronx Zoo is that, sure, Happy may be largely denied contact with other elephants, but her bonds with her human keepers are, like those Japanese companion robots or Tom Hanks’s volleyball in Cast Away, a functional substitute. The position of the Nonhuman Rights Project is that Happy is stuck in a kind of elephant Guantánamo and every day spent there is a crime against her being.

In the past year, we’ve all been forced to reckon with the bizarre variability of loneliness. Sometimes it felt good to be estranged from life. Sometimes it was loathsome. How can we measure an elephant’s suffering when we can’t even measure our own?

Happy blinked and threw some dirt on her back. Michelle gave her a handful of sweet-gum branches.

“She’s not going to eat those twigs, is she?” I asked. They looked sharp.

“Oh yeah, she’ll eat them,” Michelle said. “Or mess with them. It depends.”

The monorail came around with a fresh load of passengers, and Happy paid them no attention.

Inheritance - One Of The Pillars Of All Sufferings

I don't believe in inheritance. It is purely based on random luck and it is close to impossible to escape bad luck which one has no control. It's no wonder society lauds and considers the escapists as heroes. 

It's crazy why nothing has been done to fix it. By sheer random luck, a kid (and their future generations)  born in a wealthy family reaps the benefits of an "easy" life". 

This has nothing to do with socialism but common sense. The playing field has never equal and capitalism was supposed to make it equal at least for kids. If we don't find an innovative solution (not idiocy of perpetual redistribution of wealth) for this problem, we are playing with a time-bomb of violent revolution. 

A good piece on - To Tackle Inequality, We Need to Start Talking About Where Wealth Comes From:

Someone that is born in the UK will earn more than someone born in Sub-Saharan Africa, even if they perform exactly the same labour. Why? Because one was lucky enough to be born in a powerful country with a legacy of imperialism that has rigged the rules of the global economy in its favour. The economist Branko Milanovic has estimated that 60% of someone’s income is determined by where they were born, and an additional 20% is determined by the income level of their parents. This means that place of birth and parental background accounts for around 80% of someone’s earning power on average.

In the age of the ‘self-made’ millionaire, the lottery of birth is more important than ever. As George Monbiot once said: “If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.”

Within countries, extreme fortunes almost always derive from control over a scare resource – fossil fuels, minerals, land, monopoly networks, money etc. To the early classical economists, this kind of wealth – attained by simply being a gatekeeper to scarce resources – was deemed to be unearned, and referred to it as ‘economic rent’. But today the Sunday Times Rich List is dominated by rentiers – financiers, real estate tycoons, oil barons, monopolists and aristocrats – many of whom acquired their original fortune in somewhat questionable circumstances.

As Grace Blakeley puts it: “You do not become a billionaire through labour. You become a billionaire through inheritance, corruption or economic rents – or, in most cases, some mixture of all three.”

A good paper detailing the share of inheritance in the US and Europe between 1900 to 2010; please don't focus on the authors (I am not a fan of them) but understand reality. 

This paper provides historical series on the evolution of the share of inherited wealth in aggregate private wealth in Europe (France, the UK, Germany, Sweden) and the USA over the 1900–2010 period. Until 1910, the inheritance share was very high in Europe (70–80%). It then fell abruptly following the 1914–45 shocks, down to about 30–40% during the 1950–80 period, and is back to 50–60% (and rising) since around 2010. The US pattern also appears to be U-shaped, albeit less marked, and with significant uncertainty regarding recent trends, due to data limitations. We discuss possible interpretations for these long-run patterns. 

The key is to understand the insanity of inheritance and how rigged is the game for an unborn child. I don't have a complete solution on how the world would work without inheritance; i.e. if someone dies what will happen to his or her wealth. The focus here is to understand inheritance is a problem and not find an alternative to it. If we collectively as a society understand the problem, the solution will evolve over time. 

If I had an hour to save the world, I'd spend the first 55 minutes defining the problem.

- Albert Einstein

The Belief in Magic in the Age of Science

Abstract

The widely spread view on magical beliefs in modern industrial cultures contends that magical beliefs are a bunch of curious phenomena that persist today as an unnecessary addition to a much more important set of rational beliefs. Contrary to this view, in this article, the view is presented, which suggests that the belief in magic is a fundamental property of the human mind. Individuals can consciously consider themselves to be completely rational people and deny that they believe in magic or God despite harboring a subconscious belief in the supernatural. Research also shows how engagement in magical thinking can enhance cognitive functioning, such as creative thinking, perception and memory. Moreover, this article suggests that certain forms of social compliance and obedience to authority historically evolved from magical practices of mind control and are still powered by the implicit belief in magic. Finally, the article outlines areas of life, such as education, religion, political influence, commerce, military and political terror, and entertainment, in which magical thinking and beliefs of modern people can find practical applications.

[---]

Conclusion

Research reviewed in this article suggest that magical thinking and the belief in magic are not just a group of special phenomena that, though widely spread in modern industrial cultures, do not go beyond an unnecessary addition to rational thinking and rational beliefs. Like magical thinking, the belief in magic is a fundamental feature of the human mind, which is present throughout history, cultures, and the lifespan, and may have important implications for education and communication in the modern world. Unlike magical thinking, which remains a conscious practice throughout the lifespan, the belief in magic in adult educated individuals becomes mostly subconscious. This view links together phenomena that thus far have been studied separately from one another: magical beliefs in ancient and medieval cultures and modern developing and developed cultures, magical thinking in mentally disturbed patients, children’s magic, superstitions in adults, religious beliefs, indirect suggestion and persuasion effects in politics and commerce, military and political terror, and the use of magical effects in the entertainment industry. This new view can also explain and help develop modern-day social and educational practices that use the energy of magical thinking and magical beliefs.

- Full paper here

Cuttlefish Have Passed the Marshmallow Test

Another reason not to keep basking in the unwavering and imagined radiance of Sapiens - here. 

Good things come to those who wait—especially for the cuttlefish hanging out with Alexandra Schnell, a comparative psychologist at the University of Cambridge in England. For the past decade, Schnell has been digging into cephalopod behavior and cognition by giving them tests traditionally used to measure brain power in primates and other vertebrates. And the squishy creatures are performing remarkably well.

In fact, a new study suggests that cuttlefish can display self-control. When given the choice, some individuals opt to forgo instant gratification if it means they can get a better reward down the line. In humans and other species, this ability, known as delay maintenance, is thought to have been an important step on the evolutionary road to complex decision-making.

[---]

Donut-shaped brains aren’t the only things separating cuttlefish and large-brained vertebrates. One leading hypothesis for the driving force behind advanced cognition is that it helped animals navigate the challenges of a complex social life. But cuttlefish are not cooperatively social animals. They don’t practice parental care, and with a mere two-year life span, their generations don’t overlap. This means cuttlefish do not form strong affiliations with kin or partners. Some species even struggle to recognize members of the opposite sex. During mating, males will stick sperm packets on any individual they encounter.

“We don’t know if living in a social group is important for complex cognition unless we also show those abilities are lacking in less social species,” says Vonk. “There’s still so much room to understand more.”

 

Biophilia - Ontario Doctors Can Now Prescribe Time in Nature to Patients

The PaRx website describes just some of the findings from hundreds of studies about nature's effect on human health. Spending time in a forest drops stress hormone levels within 15 minutes, reduces inflammation in adults with COPD and risk of lung infections.12 Increased time in nature makes a person less likely to develop heart disease, high blood pressure, or diabetes.2 Nature therapy improves the psychological wellbeing of cancer patients and activates tumor-killing cells1. 

For children, time in nature boosts resilience and lessens anxiety and3 . A 20-minute walk in the park is comparable to medication when it comes to improving concentration in kids with ADHD4. Kids with more green space in their neighborhoods have lower rates of asthma and higher test scores and graduation rates.5

Offering a written prescription makes it more likely that people will follow through. As Dr. Lem said, "When I want one of my patients to remember something, I always write it down on a piece of paper and hand it to them – or, these days, send them an email so they'll remember. It's really easy to forget verbal advice." The PaRx website allows patients to log their daily outdoor time for doctors to review, offering accountability that often helps to motivate.

[---]

This is a great idea that Ontario picked up from British Columbia's example, implemented in late 2020. It's likely to spread further afield as both health care providers and patients alike realize what a hidden (and affordable) gem the outdoor world can be when it comes to boosting health. The interesting thing about time spent in nature is that, the more you do it, the more you want it, so the benefits continue to accrue once the habit is established. That is, of course, the best kind of treatment a person could ever wish for.

- More Here

Because Cats Know Things!

Soon afterward, the cats enjoyed the attention so much, they started taking the lead as we went through our daily ritual of having meals and snacks at the hotel. It was while they trooped in front of us that we noticed that they were taking a curved route to traverse the street, instead of going straight across. At first, we didn’t realize what they were up to, so didn’t really pay much attention. But as time passed, the curved pattern they walked became more pronounced, so was far more noticeable. Instead of walking directly across the road, they would walk off to the left or to the right, curving back in to finish up at the hotel terrace. Going home, the same thing happened in reverse. We were stumped, but intrigued, so chalked it up to feline idiosyncrasies.

Time passed, and the route that the cats took to the hotel terrace became even more circular. They walked a half circle outline going across the street to the cafe and another half circle going back home. It was becoming very odd. We kept trying to figure out why the cats wouldn’t go straight across the road. Soon we made a game of it, giggling as we followed the spherical route that the cats took to the restaurant terrace, and then back home again.

Over dinner one evening on the terrace, we were relaxing and enjoying ourselves watching the world go by, when we were shocked by an unbelievable explosion as a passing car disappeared into a cloud of dust, right before our eyes. Running to the road with other dining guests, we found ourselves looking upon a huge gaping hole in the street with the car crumpled inside it, about six feet deep, down from the road level. It was a sinkhole, collapsing in the very spot our cats had been circling for months. We now realized that they had detected the anomaly and had been leading us around it to keep us from harm.

The emergency services personnel later told us that a leaking water pipe had caused the earth to erode under the street, leading to the sinkhole that collapsed the road. Somehow, our brood had sensed the danger and sought to warn and protect us. Happily, no one in the car that fell through was gravely injured, though the car itself looked like it needed considerable repairs.

- Cat Premonition

Lifelong Writing Habits

The late American writer David Foster Wallace picked up some lifelong writing habits under Kennick’s tutelage. You already shared some advice for students: always give examples and make them vivid, and never be boring. And read lots of good prose. What else might help?

Free-associating on Baird and philosophers: David Armstrong and his second wife Jenny would occasionally play a little game, of trying to go a whole 2 days (? 3? week?) without ever uttering a cliché. I think they’d set up a penalty jar and put a shilling in when they slipped. Now, that is salutary! Try it. (I was thinking about that earlier today, and I inwardly used the phrase “without ever letting a cliché pass their lips”—CLANG!, oops, shilling in the jar.)

[---]

You get the final word!

OK, I’ll break the rule against repeating yourself: At a minimum, always give examples and make them vivid; never be boring, and be kind!

- The Art of Philosophical Writing: An Interview with William Lycan (by Nathan Ballantyne)